


an Ermine Cape

by newandykes



Category: Fury (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boyd just really wants a gelato, Dark Crack, Everybody Lives, Groundhog Day, i can't believe that's a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 08:36:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2541287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newandykes/pseuds/newandykes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They all think Boyd has hit some kind of divinity well.</i>
  <br/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	an Ermine Cape

Three of them are gathered around the campfire when Boyd stumbles over. It's around 8 o'clock in the morning and no one says anything, because Boyd spent a long time last night praying for the souls of the men killed in the bombardment, and it shows. They pretend they don't notice; except for Don, who actually doesn't, because he has his back to Boyd and is engrossed with whatever is cooking over the fire. 

Then Don sees them frowning and turns a little. The look that passes over Boyd's face is disturbing and, later, Grady will say that it looked as if his skull was collapsing from the inside.

"Hey Boyd," he says, drawing the 'ay' part out. "How're you doing?" 

Boyd doesn't seem to notice; he coughs, clearing his throat, and goes on staring with a hollow, horrified look in his eyes.  

"Sergeant Collier?" he says, sounding a little strangled. 

"We pullin rank now Bibe?" 

"Don?" 

"Better."

Boyd nods, as if assuring himself that, yes, this is Don. Not some imposter, or some other sergeant who just happens to be named Collier. 

He hobbles forward and then plunks down in the dirt, like he's been carrying rocks in his pockets. Grady and Gordo exchange worried glances and Don stares into his half-drunk coffee. After a moment of deliberation, he turns on the crate he's been sitting on and offers it to Boyd. Boyd looks from the coffee mug - Don's blue, chipped coffee mug - and up to the man himself. Then he jerks forward, throws up. Don jumps back. 

"Jesus," murmurs Gordo, "Not you too." 

Boyd retches one last time, then makes a noise like a wounded animal, burying his head in his hands. Don is reminded vividly of a fight in Belgium, when Boyd had gotten into a real bad spot with a German POW. The guy had beaten the living shit out of him and he'd been left with two black eyes and an even blacker space where his left canine should be. This is worse.  

"You swallow a lotta blood yesterday?" Grady asks, poking at the mess with the tip of his boot. 

"I don't know." 

"You don't _know?_ " 

Boyd looks up, that hollow look still in his eyes. "Where's Norman?" 

" _Norman?_ " 

"Yeah, where - where's Norman, Coon-Ass?" he says, shaking his fingers like he does when he wants a smoke. Even when Boyd is angry, there's never any push behind it. The venom in his tone is shocking. Uncharacteristic. 

"He's over by the sick tent," Gordo answers, ignoring Don and Grady's silent protest. 

"Sick tent," Boyd repeats, "Sick tent. Good. Right. Okay."

He stands up, swaying on his feet, and Don grabs him by the arm.

There's a funny moment where Don is holding Boyd, but not looking at him, and Boyd is staring at the top of his head. Suddenly the hollowness is gone and it's like he's looking at something old and precious; all those Hail Mary statues in the bombed out churches they pass. And Gordo thinks of the art encyclopaedia his sister keeps at home, which is the kind with big pictures and glossy paper, and is filled with paintings of army generals and their ensigns. 

 _In a real war_ , he thinks, _no one carries their fucking flag._

 

  

When he finally tracks Norman down, he's in the third sick tent. It's the second for the wounded, because out here you're more likely to die from a misstep on an empty road than from a deadly disease. Here, a few miles outside the city, they treat those injured in the bombings. 

Norman and the surgeon are arguing over the prone frame of a young blonde girl, who is bleeding profusely from her ear.

"No," Norman is saying, "No, this isn't her. She's older - around my age - and -"

"Norman!" Boyd barks, storming through what feels like row after row of dying Germans. Afterwards, he will feel kind of bad about scaring the kid. 

But right now they are camped outside an old schuhmacher's factory, or what's left of it, and the mortar crumbles onto Norman's jacket as Boyd slams him against the wall. 

"Corporal Swan, what are you -" he starts. 

"Norman, shut-up." 

Norman falls silent. He stares up at the soft grey sky so as to avoid looking Boyd in the eye. The older man releases him, digs around in his pockets, then sighs. He looks at Norman.

"You got any cigarettes?"

Norman nods hurriedly, pulling out a packet of Luckies. He lights Boyd's and Boyd does the same for him. Boyd gets right down to business. 

"Norman, what happened yesterday?"

Norman chokes. "Y-yesterday?" 

Boyd takes a long drag on his cigarette. "Yeah, walk me through it." 

"Is this a test?" 

"No, Norman, it's not a test." 

Norman swallows, Adam's apple bulging. "I... don't know, Corporal Swan." He scratches his head. "Why wouldn't you ask Gordo or - or Sergeant Collier?"

"I know you won't try to lie to me," he says, because as hard as he may try to hide it, Don cares a little too much for his own good, and Gordo's a soft soul.

"Corporal Swan?" Norman whispers.

"Yes?"

" _What_ would I lie to you about?"

 

 

Don approaches him later, after breakfast, and pulls him off to one side. _We've been given our orders_ , Boyd thinks, right as he says it.  _There's a crossroad that needs protecting, about half a day's drive from here. Just us, Davis' boys, and a couple of others._

"Right," he says. Then, loudly, "Oh. That's pretty."

He points to the river, a little way away from the factory, black and burbling. The trees beyond it are shrouded in mist. 

"Like a fucking Freidrich painting," Gordo says.  

Don looks at him with his face all screwed up, like he's looking at the sun. "Boyd?"

"Uh-huh?"

"You're okay, right?" 

Boyd looks up now. Don's tapping the side of his head. "Up there." he adds. 

He doesn't know what to say. Together with Norman, he has surmised that, no, they did not lose three tanks yesterday, and - more importantly - no one has died. So why are Don's words so clear in his head, and why does Boyd feel like he's about to lose him? Lose them all. 

"I'm fine," he says, with as much honesty as he can muster. 

Don gives him that big shit-eating grin of his and claps him on the shoulder. "Good," he says. He doesn't say "thank God for that" or "we're going to need our gunner," because, though Boyd enjoys killing Krauts as much as the next guy, he's starting to lose his touch. Don can tell. 

As he climbs inside  _Fury,_ he looks around for any signs of blood, anything out of the ordinary. But the tank is as clean as a whistle. Or it's at least as clean as any Sherman in the middle of Nazi Germany can be.  

Davis' tank rolls up alongside theirs, Davis murmuring into the radio. " _Love 1-3_ , in position. Roll out on my command." 

Boyd wonders if it's possible to remember things that haven't happened yet.

 

 

They are in a field with a Tiger and every hit they take feels familiar to Boyd. He still keeps his eyes glued to the periscope though, firing whenever he gets the chance. He is nothing if not a first class gunner.

Below the turret, Norman's .30 Cal is running steadily. He's up to his knees in casing. 

They lose their middle tank and Don is furious. "Load a white phosphorous," he bellows at them, "Blind the bastard!" 

But Boyd's hands are already on the power traverse, thinking ahead. Or thinking back. He isn't sure. 

He fires two expert shots into the Tiger's engine compartment and watches it go up in smoke. Dragon of Avarice. 

Behind him, Don's fumbling his assault rifle, unprepared as the Kraut gunner and loader try to escape. Boyd lays a hand over the barrel. "Don't worry," he says, right as Norman open fires. The red mist of blood is familiar, and the way they hit the ground running is also familiar.

He's definitely done this before.

 

 

They trick the mine and it seems like mere seconds before Grady and Norman are already on their way to the barn, Grady muttering about how Norman doesn't have to worry, because those mines are designed for tanks, and his little ass setting one off would be the equivalent of a butterfly sinking a rowboat. Or something like that. 

"Hey, Don," he says. He has the sergeant's full attention thanks to his little stunt in the field. 

( _"How did you know to shoot where you did, Bibe?"_

_"Just a hunch."_

_"It was a fucking great hunch then."_ )

"Maybe we should go. Those guys in the Tiger might have had company." 

Don looks at him like he's just slapped him, and Boyd knows it's no use. Don's gonna die in this tank, just like Boyd's gonna die following his orders, which is obviously  _how it's meant to be_ , but it's one thing stepping out the hatch into the unknown and quite another doing it knowing you're going to get a bullet through the eye. 

So when Don asks for ammunition that night, Boyd chucks it out like a hot potato and then ducks back inside the tank, heart racing. Grady is dead, because Grady's death was unavoidable amongst all that chaos. He hasn't exactly taken a logbook on who died and where. Gordo's dead too, although that is news to Boyd. He thinks about all that art Gordo's never going to see. All the fucking Friedrich paintings.

And so it's just the three of them when the Krauts open up the hatch. Norman in the bow and he and Don in the turret basket. Don's been hit three more times - neck, arm, and heart. Boyd runs out of sulfa powder around this last wound and he feels like he's failed.  

He falls back beside Don against the cold metal wall, the air leaving his lungs in a big, sad  _whumf._ "Sorry about this," he says. 

"That's alright."

"Bible," calls Norman.

"Yeah?"

"A bunch of them are coming up the front. Should I -"

"Just leave it, son," Don says, somehow still a leader even as the oxygen is draining from his head.

When they open up the tank and drop the explosives in, Boyd begins to laugh.

"So this is how it happens," he murmurs, already picking one up. 

"Boyd, don't be an idiot," Don groans, weakly trying to whack the grenade out of his hand. 

"Norman, there's a hatch at your feet if you feel like getting outta here," Boyd says, because Don cares too much and with his best friend's organs all over the place, he probably won't be in any state to tell Norman this.

"I don't -" Norman begins, but Boyd never does find out what Norman doesn't do, or think, because right at that moment the grenade goes off against his chest and he understands what Lt. Parker must have felt as he burnt to death.

He wakes up at the schuhmacher's factory. 

 

 

"Norman!" he yells, pulling the kid away from the surgeon and the blonde with the bloody ear. If anyone's tried this shit before it's Norman. Who knows how many time's the kid's gone back in time to try and save that Emma girl. 

But when Boyd explains what it happening to him, it takes him three more goes to get the point across. Norman has no idea what he's talking about. 

"Repeating it?" Norman says, slowly, as if 'repeating' is a foreign word and 'it' means something dirty. 

"Yes," Boyd says.

Norman looks like he's about to run away so Boyd grabs him by the collar and yanks him over to _Fury_. Ducking down behind a hedgerow, Boyd points.  

"Look - in a couple of seconds, Davis is going to walk over and say something to Sergeant Collier. Just you wait and see."

After a minute - that feels like it lasts an eternity - Davis does wander over and talk to Don.

"Ugh, you guys look like death," Davis exclaims. 

"There's a crossroad that needs protecting," Boyd whispers in Norman's ear, mouthing along to the words, "It'll provide a clear way to some supply trains and the Krauts are gonna want to protect it. You tell your men we're rolling out in half-an-hour."

Norman shuffles uneasily on the balls of his feet. 

"Is that true?" he asks.

"True as steel."

 

 

He still hasn't seen Don die. Boyd thinks about this as they ride in the tank, him shut up inside the turret and Norman hiding in the bow. He answers the radio for Don when it crackles and tries not to think too much about their low stock of sulfa. 

Norman is well into some story about being born with a caul around his head, about how he sees things.

"Were you born in the caul too?" he asks.

"No."

"But it's gotta be something like that, right? Like, there's something special about you? Or - or maybe this is to do with God."

Boyd looks up. "God?"

"Maybe He's chosen you," Norman says, simply, like he's talking about the weather.

Boyd shakes his head. "God wouldn't choose me. I've killed too many for that."

He waits for the .88 to knock out Love 1-5. He wonders if it's possible to prevent things that have happened a hundred times. 

 

 

Boyd fires two quick and easy rounds into the Tiger and she goes up like a bonfire. Then he tells Norman to have the .30 ready before the Krauts have even left the vehicle.

"Jesus, Bible," Grady murmurs, "You done this before?"

"Twice."

They frown at him like they're trying to solve a particularly difficult math equation. " _If Bible says he has twice shot out the engine compartment of a German tank, what are the chances that he is completely out of his mind...?_ " 

With _Love 1-3_ still in working order, they have one extra tank with them when they stop at the crossroad. As they watch him poke around in the mud, Boyd thinks about the last time Grady was near live explosives and grits his teeth. If Grady's reliving this experience too, he's got to hand it to him: the guy is dedicated. Boyd thinks having a hole blown in his stomach would be enough to keep him out of the tank forever. 

"You're sure about this?" Don asks from his standing position by _Fury_. Boyd looks down at him, then back over to Grady. 

"Certain."

They find the mine eventually and Gordo lets out a low whistle, bending down beside his friend.

" _No manches_ ," he breathes. 

Davis struts over, surveying the scene. 

"Corporal Swan," he says, "if you weren't so damn good, I'd suspect you were a double agent."  

"Boyd loves us too much for that, Sergeant," says Grady. 

Boyd summons up a wintery smile, but his eyes remain firmly fixed on the tank mine. It's black, cylindrical, and about the length of a baseball bat. It looks too innocuous to cause so much pain. He can almost hear the voices. 

( _"Can you fix it?"_

 _"Yeah, why not?"_ )  

He looks back down to find Don peering up at him again, though he looks away quickly enough.  _He can't actually think I'm..._ Boyd starts, then stops. Of course he does. How else could he know where the mines would be? He's not good at that sort of thing. He's not Intelligence. He wouldn't know Normandy beach from the Silesian mountains on a map. And how else would he know where to fire at the Tiger? 

So after Norman spots the battalion, when Davis and his boys offer to go for help, Don is awful quiet-like. Not how he usually is. And it hurts almost as much as when Boyd pushes Grady out of the way and takes the hit from the anti-tank rocket. "Dead on impact" wouldn't be the right phrase because he's still lucid when Don yells at them to drag him out of the way, and still able to hear as Grady picks him up by his lapels and says, "Sorry about this." 

He wakes up at the schuhmacher's factory, feeling cold. 

 

 

Boyd goes and finds Norman and gives him the debrief again. Then they sit high in the rafters of the factory and smoke. Boyd tries not to think about the instant and efficient way Don had dealt with his dead body while Norman tells the story about the caul again. 

"Where did you say you grew up?" Boyd interrupts.

Norman tells him. It sounds picturesque. He can almost smell ma's apple pies cooling on the windowsill, and apparently it's coastal too. 

"Where are _you_ from?" 

Boyd takes a long drag on his cigarette, then blows out a couple of rings. 

"Des Moines." 

"That's pretty far inland, ain't it?" 

"Mm-hmm. I absolutely hated it. I would've liked to live by the sea, like you." 

"Well... you got Normandy," Norman says, awkwardly, and Boyd can't tell if he's joking or not. 

"Kid, I hope I never see the beach again." Then, he raises his voice, loud enough to scare away the doves roosting in the crawlspace. "Not one fucking grain of sand!" 

 

 

At one point, maybe the eighth or ninth time round, he warns  _Love 1-5_ about the Tiger before it's blown up. At another, he warns Don about the land mine at the crossroads. Both times, he is hailed as a hero for a couple of minutes. Then, he is forced to deal with the repercussions. 

Don drives them around the back of the field, giddy with the promise of a good fight. More land mines await them there and Boyd gets to experience first hand what it is like having your legs blown clean off.

When they don't die at the crossroads, they die that night when the Tiger's friends come across them in an open pasture and let them have it. Gordo and Norman die when the bow is destroyed - so much for Norman's lucky birth shroud.

Grady dies in a hail of gunfire, trying to help an injured, limping Boyd down the back of the tank. There, he and Don wait with the loader's body draped over them. Gone are all Boyd's suspicions about the sergeant; he wipes Grady's blood across the other man's face and prays to God that what Davis had said that morning - about them looking like death - pays off.  

And he prays that the Krauts will shoot him first when it doesn't, but they don't. Boyd finally gets to see Don die and it's every bit as stupid and heroic as he thought it would be.

 

 

He punches Norman so hard he slams into the table behind him and knocks over one of the dead bodies.

"She's dead, Norman!" he yells, kicking him, "You fucked her and you left her and now she's dead! Just give it up already!" 

Grady must have been walking past because suddenly he is behind Boyd, pulling him away. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he shouts, slapping him around the head like he's teasing him about his moustache again. "He's our only good bow gunner Bible! Kill him and you've killed us all!" 

Bible relaxes. Grady gives him one last slap and he swipes him away, apologising tiredly as Norman pulls himself up off the ground. 

"Sorry. Sorry, it's just - she's dead, Norman." He can feel the eyes of everyone in the tent trained on him, and he wishes he could just sink into the ground and disappear. He doesn't know when he turned into such a hard-ass. 

"I've been having the weirdest dreams lately," he'll tell Grady, later that day. "You're there. So are Don and Gordo. Norman too." 

"Go back to Kansas, Dorothy." 

Boyd knows they will be rounding on the Tiger any moment now. He appears to have misplaced his ruby slippers. 

 

 

The 20th time round, he gets up before everyone else and treks over to the river. The dewey grass is cold enough to freeze his ass off, but Don joins him an hour later, and they sit like high school sweethearts with their feet dangling in the water. At least Boyd does. Don kicks aggressively at the stuff, like a toddler, while he talks about life before North Africa, something he doesn't do often.

He's yabbering away about a girl named Rose, who he was gonna marry, when Boyd interrupts, because Don is sounding for all the world like Gordo. Gordo would go on and on for hours about this one girl in that art encyclopaedia of his - the Botticelli one, in the huge clam - and the ridiculousness of it would annoy Boyd immensely. No one's hair can be _that_ gold, and he doesn't think "gravity-defying breasts" are a real thing.

He interrupts because he doesn't like the way Don's using the past tense so much. " _Was_ going to marry" implies a lot, especially since Boyd can't see any girl in her right mind saying no to Don. She is obviously dead.      

"I was gonna join the paratroopers," he blurts, right when Don's in the middle of describing the girl's little ski-jump nose.

"Oh?" Don says. 

"My ma didn't want me to." 

"Didn't think it'd be safe?"

"Mm-hmm," Boyd says, eyes shut, smiling serenely. The water lapping around his ankles reminds him of his uncle's houseboat in Wisconsin, where they would spend Christmas break. His father would take him night fishing and he used to think the darkness could swallow him up whole, if it weren't for his little 12-year-old feet, luminescent with cold. 

"I can't imagine you jumping out of an airplane," Don says. 

"Me neither," Boyd agrees, even though, right now, he'd give anything for the chance to do just that. "You ever learnt how to swim?" 

"No," Don says, eyeing the water warily, "Did you?"

"I don't think I had to," Boyd says. 

"First time I tried, I was eight and I nearly drowned. We were on holiday in San Francisco." 

Boyd can't imagine what it must be like, drowning. He's always been a good swimmer. Maybe he _was_ born in the caul.  

 

 

They all think Boyd has hit some kind of divinity well. Struck some sort of underground oil pipe of hidden knowledge. He points out mines left, right and centre; tells them where to shoot, where not to shoot. Though he can never get them out of that crossroad alive. 

He spills the beans to Gordo after a particularly bad repeat, because he figures if the Mexican won't believe him, he'll at least humour him. Gordo turns out to actually be a lot more understanding than Boyd thought he might.

"What you got here is a divine gift, man," he says, gesturing expansively to the pastures around them. "Like, uh... the coat. Joseph's."

"The Coat of Many Colours," Boyd murmurs, and Gordo tells him about  _t_ _he Oprichniki_ by Nikolai Nevrev.

"That was my favourite when I was a kid. The book went alphabetically by country, so it was right towards the back. Ivan the Terrible wore this big ermine cape, silver like bullet casing, and you'd instantly know it was him." He sighs deeply, out his nose. "Whenever we went to mass, that's what I would think of when I heard about that coat. Not some asshole in a rainbow poncho."  

Boyd wonders if other people have made any attempts at changing the future - the future of other realities. Right now, is there some Alternate Boyd, back at home in Des Moines, eating pot roast and playing darts?  _No_ , he thinks. Chances are Alternate Boyd is still in Germany somewhere. He likes to think that he is standing in some bombed out kitchen, making eggs and bacon while Don sits on the countertop, swinging his feet back and forth like they're still at the river. And Gordo and Grady will be looking for cigarettes while Norman plays ragtime on the piano. 

"It's divine favour," Gordo says, "And that's better than a poncho any day of the week." 

 _Divine favour,_ Boyd thinks, mulling the words over in his head. That implies that he's been given this day - this day in particular - for a reason.

He wonders how many explosives it'd take to blow up a tank.  

 

 

The answer is: a lot. The first time around - it's got to be the 50th repeat - the guy at the weapons shed asks him if he's joking and laughs when Boyd says he isn't. The second time around, he tells him he can't hand over that many explosives without orders from a superior officer, and he sure as hell isn't going to waltz up to Don and ask for a signed permission slip. 

Third time around - third time lucky - he is caught trying to steal the stuff in his rucksack and is beaten up by a couple of G.I.s. He is going to face a court marshalling tomorrow - if tomorrow ever comes. Don looks at him with that same look he gave him 3rd time around, all confusion and disappointment. 

"Corporal, why would you... _How_ could you...?" Grady whispers, eyebrows knitted together like angry caterpillars.

"Now look who's pulling rank," Boyd says, grinning with his bloodied teeth.  

Fourth and fifth time around, he just watches. Sees when the soldiers pass the shed, counts the seconds between each march. He looses count of how many times he messes up and is forced to explain himself.

( _"Oh, I was just looking for my..."_

_"Must have gotten lost..."_

_"Oh, hey, I was_ just _looking for you..."_ )

None of them question him if he is not caught in the act himself. He is Corporal Boyd Swan, who would never be suspected of being a spy for the Germans because he's so damn good - except by his own sergeant, who knows him better than anyone else. 

Eventually, he does manage to do it and it is glorious. He plants several time bombs underneath a disabled tank towards the end of the column, out of harm's way, and when they go off and his team goes to help put out the fire, he takes care of  _Fury._

Staring at the pile of mines underneath the Sherman, he almost can't do it. The tank has been his home for years now. He's slept it it, eaten in it. The first time they ever had to kill anyone, he wept in it. But he will continue to stay in  _Fury_ forever, if he can't figure a way out of this, and it's that horrifying thought that allows him to pull the trigger.  

Don's reaction is worse than anyone's. While Gordo, Grady and Norman try desperately to douse the flames - it's harder, because their tank is further away from the taps - he just stands and stares, mouth slightly open, eyes vacant. When the fire is finally put out, the tank looks like God has taken His mighty fist and punched right down its middle. It looks like the hole in Grady's stomach. 

Due to all the noise and confusion caused by the other explosion, none of them suspect it was him. "Boyd?" they will say, later. "No, Boyd loves us too much to do this." 

There's no place like home. 

 

 

That day, they help the grunts prepare for battle and then bury the bodies of the men and women who died during the bombardment. It's awful work. As the sun rises, it gets hotter and hotter until they are stripped down to their tee shirts. Boyd doesn't remember it being this hot. Grady says it's like France all over again, with the horses, but he's not trying to get a rise out of anyone. It is exactly like France.

Don buries the bodies with swift, efficient strokes of the shovel, and Boyd is reminded once again of the day Don thought he was a spy. _That's how he would have done it,_  Boyd thinks. _If he had gotten out, that's how he would have buried me._

They pass by their tank again on the way back to the factory.

"What sort of a bastard would do that?" Gordo mutters.

"It was probably an accident," Norman says, and he sneaks a glance at Boyd. Even if he does know, Boyd knows he won't say anything. That caul's given Norman some kind of special power, alright. It's called _empathy_. 

Inside the factory, a mess hall has been set up. "God, can you imagine?" Grady says, "This is what we would be missing out on."

"I wouldn't have gone," Gordo laughs, nervously, but they all know he's lying. If they could have _Fury_ back in one piece, right now, they would be out of here in a flash. 

The guy running the canteen makes a big show of piling their plates high with food; steak, liberated from the freshly dead cows left behind by the Krauts; vegetables from the pastures behind the schuhmacher's. He must have heard about the accident.

At the table, Grady and Gordo chat away like a couple of birds in a cage. They're content to be together with the team, tank or no tank. Even Norman musters that odd, crooked grin of his. Boyd suspects the kid is just glad not to be fighting for a change.  

Don still hasn't spoken and by the time the four of them are onto desert, his steak still lies untouched. 

"You seen that other picture of Ivan the Terrible?" Gordo whispers in his ear, "The one by Ilya Repin? You see his son's eyes, as he's being killed, and they're so sad. That's what he looks like." 

Annoyed, Boyd grabs Don's plate and starts cutting up his steak for him. He imagines his house back in Des Moines burning to the ground; a wooden horse, the family photo albums, the trophy his mother won at the village show for best cake - all of it gone. He doesn't care if he's acting like his mother, and that Grady is laughing, because if this is permanent, he doesn't want Don starving himself while mourning over a hunk of twisted metal. 

"You gonna feed it to him too, Bible?" Grady says.

Boyd pushes the plate back and gives Don a long, hard look in the eye. Don stares at the plate like he's new to the concept of food and Boyd wants to shout at him. _Snap out of it!_ Don is the strongest of them all and Boyd doesn't think he could live with himself if he played a part in his undoing. 

So it comes as a big relief when the sergeant picks up his fork and skewers a piece of the meat. He chews for a long moment, then calmly reaches across the table for the wine bottle.

"It's tough," he says, curtly, pouring himself a glass. 

"Rigor mortis," says Norman. 

"No," he replies, "It's because the cows out here are underfed. The horses are too. It's a travesty." 

"You likes horses," Grady murmurs. 

"I do."

Don sips his wine and looks over at Boyd, acknowledging him. "You didn't say grace." 

Boyd smiles stiffly and returns to his meal. Something tells him that the Lord is  _very_ well aware of how thankful he is. 

 

 

He awakes drenched in sweat, stockstill under his tarpaulin sleeping bag. It's early morning, the pastures around them are covered in mist like one of Gordo's fucking Friedrich paintings. He slips out onto the cold grass and checks his clothes, still dirty from the day before. Still dirty from burying all the bodies.

He feels a lump rise in his throat and he runs his hands through his hair, breathing heavily. The breaths soon dissolve into laughter and soon he's bent over double with it, waking the others.

"Bible," Grady groans, dragging himself into a sitting position, "What the hell?"

Boyd giggles, wiping at the tears forming in his eyes. "Sorry, I just - _sorry_  - I just remembered the funniest joke." 

"Care to share?" says Gordo. 

"No, you - you wouldn't get it." 

"Es un pendejo." 

"No Mexican in my tank Corporal Garcia," they hear Don say, and even though they can't tell whether he's being funny or not, they still grin. All of them except Boyd.

"Hey," he says, tapping Don's sleeping bag with the tip of his boot, "He can speak Mexican all he wants."

Don rolls over, fixing him with those scary-blue eyes.

"Oh yeah?" he says.

Boyd nods his head vigorously, refusing to look away. "War's nearly over, Sergeant Collier."

"Is it now?" 

"Yeah," Boyd says, with an intensity that shocks them all. "Yeah, I can feel it in my bones."

"You think we're gonna kill Hitler?" Gordo murmurs.

"Yeah, I do."

"Maybe one of us'll finally get that chocolate bar," Grady says, flopping back onto his rollout mat. 

"You _that_ desperate, Coon-Ass?" calls Norman from behind the fence. 

"He's all yours if you want him, son," Grady replies. 

Boyd smiles into the tarpaulin as he tries to catch a few more moments of rest. He hears Don shifting across the grass and he thinks that, after the war, he'll take them all to Italy so see the  _Birth of Venus,_ and Gordo can tell them about how the seashell is meant to be some crude metaphor - something to do with genitals. 

They'll buy a bunch of old, dopey horses - big and slow - and they can all ride out to Tuscany. Grady can open that car shop he's been talking about and he'll find Norman a nice Italian girl, though something tells him she'll never quite replace Emma. 

Boyd will drag Don out to Florence for gelato, and he can sit in the shade of the Basilica di Santa Maria while Boyd does confessional, which all sounds stupid and improbable but he wants to make sure that next time God - or whoever did this - decides to stick him somewhere for the rest of eternity, it's somewhere beautiful, with a lot of sun.

He never wants to see another Sherman again. 

 

 


End file.
